Video files are generally larger than other types of files, such as photos or regular images. If we accumulate a lot of them, they end up taking up a significant amount of storage space on our devices. Furthermore, sharing them can be somewhat cumbersome. That's why it's so useful to find a tool that allows us to reduce the size of a video without losing quality.
There are many programs and online services that offer video compression, but not all of them are careful enough with regard to quality . Obviously, some quality loss is always inevitable in the compression process, but using the right tools makes that loss almost imperceptible.
Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between the two ways we can approach this image reduction task: on the one hand, using the services of a website ; on the other, downloading specialized software to our computer . The first is a quicker solution (it doesn't require downloads or installations), although less secure, since it involves uploading our videos, where they could be exposed to prying eyes.
The proposals that we present below focus exclusively on the second of these two modalities: the video editing programs that we can download to our computer to reduce videos and that can also be used to execute many other functions. Here goes our list:
HandBrake
HandBrake is an open-source, cross-platform tool that allows you to edit and convert videos to any format. Its features also include the ability to compress or reduce the size of audiovisual files.
In this particular matter, which is what interests us in this post, it must be said that HandBrake offers a lot of flexibility in compression options. For example, it allows us to eliminate unnecessary audio tracks, modify the resolution, or change the bit rate or frame rate. Many ways to achieve good results.
It is available in the Microsoft operating system starting with Windows 10.
Link: HandBrake
Free HD Video Converter
This tool was conceived and designed exclusively for Windows. Free HD Video Converter is also very versatile, allowing you to choose different strategies to reduce the size of your videos. All of this, of course, without compromising their quality.
One of the most notable features of this tool is its bar, which we can move in one direction or another, depending on what we want to predominate in the final result of our task: more compression or better quality. To everyone's taste.
Link: Free HD Video Converter
Movavi Video Converter
Movavi Video Converter is a highly downloaded and popular video editing software worldwide. With it, you can reduce the size of a video or convert it to other formats to make it smaller and take up less space. Notably, it's one of the few compression programs on the market that allows you to work with 4K quality.
Although it is a paid program, it has a logically limited but very interesting free version.
Link: Movavi Video Converter
Shotcut
Another superb video editor, truly comprehensive, with numerous and interesting options available to its users. Regarding the issue of video compression without losing quality, Shotcut focuses on format conversions that significantly reduce file size with quite good results. It offers a fairly decent free version, with some features only available in the paid version.
Link: Shotcut
VLC
We've talked about VLC many times before on Movilforum. And rightly so, because it's the most famous and widely used video editor in the world. It's free and open-source software developed by the VideoLAN project. We've left it for last on our list because it's precisely the most appealing option of them all.
For the task of reducing the size of a video so that it does not lose quality, VLC offers us three proposals, explained below:
Change the video format
- In the main menu, click on "Media".
- select "Convert/Save".
- Next, we choose the video that we want to reduce using the button "Add".
- To finish, we choose the new format and its size, and click on "Save".
Modify the bitrate
- Again, in the main menu we are going to "Media".
- Now we select «Convert", choosing the video that we want to reduce with the button «Add".
- In the tab «Convert / Save» we choose the option "Convert".
- Next, we click on the settings icon (with a wrench, next to Profile).
- In this new window, we select "Video codec".
- On this screen we adjust the bit rate and frame rate options according to our preferences
- To finish, we click on "Save".
Video trim
- Let's go to VLC main menu.
- There we select «See Menu».
- Among the options that are shown, we choose the one of "Advanced Controls".
- Now we must play the video that we want to reduce and click on the button "Engrave" on the specific scene you want to trim. Then we close the crop by clicking on the same button.
Link: VLC